Nevertheless, Madame Récamier, although persuaded of the uselessness of her application, did not hesitate. She sent for her carriage and stepped into it, without the hope which she left to the condemned man. She drove through the Campagna infested with brigands, reached Rome, and failed to find the Director of Police. She waited two hours at the Palazzo Fiano, counting the minutes of a life of which the last was approaching. When M. de Norvins arrived, she explained to him the object of her journey. He replied that the sentence was pronounced and that he had not the necessary power to suspend it.
The Albano fisherman.
Madame Récamier set out again heart-broken; the prisoner had ceased to live when she approached Albano. The inhabitants were awaiting the Frenchwoman on the road; so soon as they discovered her, they hastened up to her. The priest who had attended the culprit brought her his last vows: he thanked la dama, whom he had not ceased to seek with his eyes while going to the place of execution; he begged her to pray for him: for a Christian has not done with everything and is not beyond fear when he is no more. Madame Récamier was led by the ecclesiastic to the church, where the crowd of handsome Albano peasant-women followed her. The fisherman had been shot at the hour at which the sun rose upon the bark, now unguided, which he had been accustomed to steer over the seas and upon the shores which he had been accustomed to survey.
To become disgusted with conquerors, one must have known all the ills they cause, one must have been a witness to the indifference with which men sacrifice to them the most inoffensive creatures in a corner of the globe in which they have never set foot. Of what consequence to Bonaparte's successes were the days of a poor net-maker in the Papal States? Undoubtedly, he never knew that that paltry fisherman existed; amid the clatter of his struggle with kings, he did not so much as know the name of his plebeian victim.
The world perceives in Napoleon naught save victories; the tears with which the triumphal columns are cemented do not fall from his eyes. And I, I think that, out of those despised sufferings, those calamities of the small and the lowly, are formed, in the councils of Providence, the secret causes which hurl the ruler from his pinnacle. When instances of injustice accumulate in such a way as to bear down the weight of fortune, the scale descends. There is blood which is dumb and blood which cries out: the blood of the battle-field is drunk in silence by the earth; peaceable blood when shed spurts with a moan towards Heaven; God receives it and avenges it. Bonaparte slew the Albano fisherman; a few months later[403], he was banished among the fishermen of Elba, and he died among those of St. Helena.
Did my vague memory, scarce outlined in Madame Récamier's thoughts, appear to her amid the plains of the Tiber and the Anio? I had already passed through those melancholy wastes; I had left a tomb there honoured by Juliet's friends. When M. de Montmorin's daughter[404] died, in 1803, Madame de Staël and M. Necker wrote me letters of regret; you have seen those letters. Thus I received at Rome, almost before I knew Madame Récamier, letters dated from Coppet; it was the first sign of an affinity of destiny. Madame Récamier has also told me that my Letter of 1804 to M. de Fontanes served her as a guide in 1814, and that she often read and re-read the following passage:
"Whosoever has no tie left in life should come to live in Rome. There he will find for company a land which will feed his reflections and occupy his heart, and walks which will always say something to him. The stone which he treads under foot will speak to him; the dust which the wind raises beneath his steps will contain some human greatness. If he is unhappy, if he has mingled the ashes of those whom he loved with so many illustrious ashes, with what charm will he not pass from the sepulchre of the Scipios to the last resting-place of a virtuous friend!... If he is a Christian, ah! how can he then tear himself away from that land which has become his country, from that land which has witnessed the birth of a second empire, holier in its cradle, greater in its might than that which preceded it, from that land where the friends whom we have lost, sleeping with the martyrs in the catacombs, under the eye of the Father of the Faithful, appear as though they ought to be the first to awake in their dust and seem to be nearer to the skies?"
But, in 1814, I was only a vulgar cicerone to Madame Récamier, the common property of all travellers; more fortunate in 1823, I had ceased to be a stranger to her and we were able to talk together of the Roman ruins.
*
In Naples, where Madame Récamier went in the autumn[405], the occupations of solitude ceased. Scarce had she alighted at her inn, when King Joachim's ministers came hastening up. Murat, forgetting the hand which had changed his whip[406] into a sceptre, was ready to join the Coalition. Bonaparte had planted his sword in the middle of Europe, as the Gauls planted their blade in the middle of the mallus[407]; around Napoleon's sword were drawn up in a circle kingdoms which he distributed to his family. Caroline[408] had received that of Naples. Madame Murat was not so elegant an antique cameo as the Princess Borghese; but she had more expression and more wit than her sister. In the firmness of her character one recognised the blood of Napoleon. If the diadem had not been for her an ornament for a woman's head, it would still have been the emblem of a queen's power.